- Iridium
- Apr 4, 2002
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Wretched Harp
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Shigesato Itoi, producer of Mother 2 and two other games, says in a recent interview that videogames are, at their best, like prostitutes. A prostitute, he is quick to distinguish, is a lot like a lover, only that it requires no emotional input from its momentary significant other. Ninety-nine times out a hundred, a prostitute knows exactly what its client wants, and relinquishes itself to its client's will. As the client does what it wants, the prostitute does not complain. A fee -- usually money -- was paid to the prostitute before the services are rendered. The prostitute has no right to complain. If the client chooses to kill the prostitute and leave her in the gutter somewhere, that's not to say that he got, exactly, a free ride. Strangling the prostitute required a degree of emotional involvement that was not part of the original contract. Not only that -- the client had to at least show the prostitute the required sum of money in order to get her to take her clothes off.
Mother 2: Giigu Returns, which would be the greatest videogame of all-time if Super Mario Bros. 3 didn't exist[1], is most definitely a prostitute. I won't say that it's a prostitute with a heart of gold, or even a prostitute who transforms into a princess or a dragon. It's a prostitute that's missing one tooth somewhere you won't discover unless you look at her really hard, and she has this lovely grin on her face for some reason or another. She does nothing to provoke you to be cruel to her. And between the time she takes her stockings off and the time she puts them back on, she's going to tell you a story so creepy you will never be able to forget it. Your time with her will not be entirely comfortable, nor will it be entirely enjoyable.
There are plenty of other games that will fit Itoi's description of the perfect prostitute videogame. Any member of the Dragon Quest canon, even II, which is hard as hell at some points, will hold your hand and massage your shoulders right up until their final battles against demonic evils. Dragon Quest, the brainchild of producer Yuji Horii, musician Koichi Sugiyama, and artist Akira Toriyama, is a story of a boy killing a dragon and saving a princess. In every one of those games, not a thing is impossible to a player who has spent time preparing. Preparing involves walking in circles in a world where castles and towns are represented by icons as large as the player-character himself. Every few steps, a battle pops up. The player fights the battle, in which he is hurt though not killed. When he wins, he is awarded with money and experience points. The experience points make his character stronger so that his next fight will end with him in better physical condition. The money allows him to buy better weapons or armor so he can deal more damage to the enemies. With each new region entered on his journey, the hero finds stronger enemies and more expensive equipment at town shops. Dragon Quest games are thin, in that the goal is always to vanquish the evil, and this is always done through simply fighting monster after monster until you're strong enough to kill stronger monsters. Producer Yuji Horii is a gambler, himself, and his games exude evidence of being made by a gambler who still affords himself time to daydream -- no challenge is unwinnable to the player with the persistence and audacity to keep playing. The trick of a Dragon Quest game lies in that there is no "jackpot." Even a complete victory of the entire game doesn't feel like hitting a jackpot. Each battle won feels like another coin dropped in a slot machine, and though no battle results in the exact feeling of a "loss," the player never quite feels the satisfaction of a large victory. With a few gold pieces and experience points to spur him onward, the player keeps playing. Here's where the game's simple grace comes into play: battles go by so quickly, and so many numbers flash up in front of the player's eyes so quickly, that it always feels like something's being done. It's too intriguing not to keep playing.
Dragon Quests are very much videogames. Dating back as far as 1986, they're as much videogames as Balloon Fight or Ice Climber, where the goal in need of being accomplished is mostly understandable from the player's first glance at the screen. Dragon Quest's evolution of the form of the traditional videogame is that it requires a button-press for the player to understand what he's capable of doing. Press the A button, and a list of options pops up in the upper-left of the screen. The choices available are "Talk," "Look," "Tools," "Magic," "Stairs," "Door," "Equip," and "Status." These choices are not entirely self-explanatory. A little digging, however, and the player intrigued into playing will find the game simply playable. This formula has sustained the series through nearly twenty years of multi-million-selling success, and Dragon Quest is indisputably the one series of videogames that Japanese people, as a people, play. It never feels like something that belongs to anyone other than the player, which is why writers for Japanese magazines are able to write about the game so proudly. One magazine proudly reported that approximately two people in each car on each train on the Yamanote Line in central Tokyo, at that very moment, owned a copy of Dragon Quest VII for PlayStation. That game had just sold a record-breaking seven million and some copies in a furious display that had resulted in, among other things, a lucky little kid getting the back of his head clubbed by a guy on a scooter, who proceeded to snatch up his game and speed away, never to be found.
No one, on the record, got beaten up over the original Mother, based on a not-so-popular novel of the mid-1980s. Mother, released in 1989, was, according to producer Shigesato Itoi, "Like Dragon Quest -- only with a different name." Unlike Dragon Quest, Mother's story took place in a modern setting, strangely enough America of what might have been the 1950s. The hero, Ness, uses a baseball bat as a weapon, and his great enemy is an alien intent on invading earth. The game tells its story with as few spectacular flourishes as possible, and coasts toward its conclusion as the most competent Dragon Quest rip-off ever constructed, even until today.[2] If one wanted to say that Mother goes wrong somewhere in its imitation of Dragon Quest, one could most easily point to the game's tenacious difficulty. It's almost as if, at parts, the game doesn't want you to win. Some players complained. Some players gave up. Dragon Quest IV then proceeded to sell ridiculous numbers. Mother was, in many ways, a flash in the pan, made at the height of the Famicom's popularity by a man who, among other things, hosted a popular television series, wrote the occasional novel, and is renowned even now as the greatest interviewer of Japanese celebrities.[3] Also in 1989, television celebrity and comedian-soon-to-turn-movie-director "Beat" Takeshi Kitano produced the legendary game Takeshi no chousenjou, which is legendary in that it opens with the disclaimer "This game is made by a man who hates videogames" and features a final boss that requires 20,000 hits to kill.
Something or other must have clicked in Itoi's brain between 1989 and 1991, when he began work on Mother 2. It was obvious from the start that Beat Takeshi, then just getting started on his movie-directing career, never intended to make another videogame. His first and last game was something of a big practical joke. Takeshi's only reason for making it was so that guys like me could sit here fifteen years later and write about how the game caused thousands upon thousands of little kids to call Nintendo's hint lines weeping. I take it that Itoi looked at that game and thought, simply, "So that's a what a videogame is."
Chousenjou evokes, if nothing else, the very manifestation of that dark feeling you first felt when you played a game you didn't like. What is it about games we don't like? It's a very different feeling from not liking a movie. A movie continues on, believing in itself, even if we don't think its jokes are at all funny. A game lets us put down the controller and say we've had enough. When we do this, however, it's not done without a certain feeling of guilt. Games require an investment of self to even begin playing them. To put one down without completing it requires the player to first understand how much of his input is going to be necessary to see the game forward to its conclusion. This creates within the player a feeling of something that never will be because they lack the strength to continue. To give up a game requires us to first give up a part of ourselves. It's this feeling that Takeshi no chousenjou seeks to evoke in everyone. Beat Takeshi, a man capable of making films that evoke elements of the human experience people are capable of identifying with, is also capable of great mischief. His only gaming attempt was a successful one at accomplishing great mischief.[4]
Itoi was armed with a certain number of tools before he began conceptual work on Mother 2. He'd copy-edited a newspaper and had even tried his hand at writing manga. He'd hosted a television show where he took cameras around on investigative reports to subway tunnels, which gave birth to a genre of reality television that continues to clog airways in Japan today. He once did a not-entirely-successful investigation of some pretty ordinary tunnels in some pretty ordinary mountains, as well. When asked his occupation, he'd most likely reply that he was a journalist, which is probably why master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki cast him as the voice of the father character in the legendary film "My Neighbor Totoro." The choice baffled millions of Japanese at the time, though Miyazaki asserted he had chosen a journalist because journalists are honest tellers of the truth to honest people.
Perhaps the sharpest of Itoi's tools is his literary background. Not only is he a rather devoted fan of Japanese postmodern masterpiece novelist Kobo Abe, he's friends with Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Murakami's novels no doubt influenced some of the bold themes that Mother 2 tackles. Murakami and Itoi, in fact, had penned a short story collection in 1986, one called Yume de aimashou ("Let's meet in a dream"). That collection, claimed Murakami's introduction, had no idea what it was trying to accomplish. The pieces within are not short stories, nor are they essays. They are simply things that the authors wrote to amuse themselves. The collection ended up amusing a million or so Japanese people as well. In the author photo, Itoi is the bushy-haired guy on the bicycle.
The scattershot method that had produced Yume de aimashou was also used in Mother 2. Itoi says that Mother was more or less based verbatim on the story of the novel. The only challenge was twisting the novel's story so that it fit into the context of a videogame. Battles, for example, which had to exist for the game to be a worthwhile Dragon Quest clone, had to be explained in supplemental story material. Mother 2, says Itoi, was written much less like a novel or a videogame adaptation of a novel and more like a newspaper. The producer's job in the production of the game was akin to that of a copy-editor. Rather than write stories, the copy-editor has to look at all the stories that other editors have written, and face the most difficult decisions that come with putting together a newspaper: that is, the positioning of the stories on the page. In videogames and in newspapers, the positioning of the elements is far more key, says Itoi, than the quality of the elements themselves.
Hideo Kojima, something of a Mother 2 fan, disagrees with this, though only in practice. Kojima's recent masterwork Metal Gear Solid 2 was written entirely by Kojima. The story of that game involves a super-spy being killed on a tanker ship, and his successor attacking terrorists on board an offshore oil spill containment facility. In the end, the protagonist's struggle is revealed to be something of a living simulation of the battles fought by the protagonist of the previous game. Kojima, as big a fan of Kobo Abe as Itoi, says this was deliberate, in that he wanted to tell a story that could "only be told in a videogame, about a videogame, as a videogame." Kojima wrote every line of dialogue for every scene of that game that included dialogue.
Itoi wrote almost every text window in Mother 2. There's no existing tally of which lines he didn't write, and who wrote them, at any rate. It doesn't entirely matter. A second play-through of Mother 2 will reveal to the player that the positioning of the elements of the game is in far more delicate a balance than anything else. Mother 2 is a game fraught with long, bewildering spells of uneasiness. The whole beginning of the game, for one thing, where the player is alone in his hometown, reeks of loneliness. When the hero and his friend journey into the reverse side of the metropolis Fourside via a portal in the back wall of a jazz cafe, the fifteen-year-old me felt something like nausea. For an hour or more of the game, the player wanders through a town where the background is black, the buildings are upside-down, and the citizens are sometimes invisible. When the player enters Magicant, the world inside the hero's mind, the monsters may just be too strong to defeat. It might just be impossible to gain the right number of levels needed to successfully progress. Yet some set-pieces are bursting joys to play, like the traffic jam on the desert highway. What sounds like a mundane set-up actually turns out to love the player far more completely than segments involving magic, psychic powers, or dinosaurs. In this traffic-jam segment, the heroes depart a bus, enter a little roadside drugstore, and then, if they choose, wander the desert a bit. The only wandering that's necessary takes them to the far right side of the map, where a man has set up a small hut for the purpose of having a place to stay while he digs into the earth, confident he'll find something. Stay at his house, and when you wake up, you'll find the traffic jam has cleared up, and you are free to enter the tunnel and cross into the big city of Fourside for the first time. What, exactly, transpires over the course of the night, you don't know. It's not the point. Traffic jams, as traffic jams, clear up. It's what they do. They wouldn't be traffic jams unless they cleared up at some point. Even after the traffic jam clears up, however, the music will resemble a blend of three lazy Mexican radio stations, complete with static. Should the player wander the desert some more before or after staying at the roadside shack, he might find a black sesame seed, a single pixel in height and width, buried in the sand. The black sesame seed is lonesome without the white sesame seed. He says the white sesame seed is somewhere in the desert. If you could find it, and tell it the black sesame seed's story, the black sesame seed would appreciate it. You can find the white sesame seed if you want. Should you do this, you get no reward aside from heatstroke. Yes, the desert is the only place in the game you can get heatstroke. Heatstroke acts a lot like poison, draining hit points with each footstep. Sometimes, in battle -- with UFOs, spontaneously combusting oak trees, and raging buffalo, as the desert would have it -- your characters will pass out from the heat. The only cure for heatstroke is, of course, the wet towel, sold only at the roadside drugstore.
What is this desert event, in the context of the game? Just prior to entering the desert, the players triumph over a great evil blob in an underground factory near the town of Threed. The blob, Master Belch, had been, up until the heroes arrive, terrorizing the commune of Mister Saturn. Mister Saturn are little big-nosed, mustached, bowtie-headed, beady-eyed creatures that all refer to themselves as "Mister Saturn." Speaking in a dialect that overuses the word "Boing" and tactfully uses a font designed by Itoi himself.[5] They help our heroes because our heroes need to earn access to the sacred sanctuary behind their city, and in order to do that, they need to first kill Master Belch. How do our heroes stumble upon the Mister Saturn commune in the first place? Well, the village is accessible only by a ladder in the woods north of the town of Threed. Threed, prior to our two heroes' arrival, had been plunged into an eternal nightfall, and also under siege of zombies. Our two heroes, Paula and Ness, investigate the zombie problem a little bit, only to be kidnapped by a woman at the inn, who assaults them with a crash of music we'll only hear once in the game. They wake up in a cave, lost. Paula uses her psychic powers to call to their friend Jeff, a student at a boarding school in the city of Winters. We then awaken, as Jeff, and break out of the boarding school. We enter a small dungeon constructed by a man called "Brickroad." It's not too complicated, as dungeons run. It has some nice music, though. We cross a lake called Loch Tess on the back of the Loch Tess Monster, attracted with the help of a gum-chewing monkey. It's then on to Stonehenge and the laboratory of Dr. Andonuts, Jeff's uncle, a brilliant scientist, and a man who seems to not remember being Jeff's uncle. The music in his laboratory, heard only once in the game, is a forty-second hum of bass with a spare electone melody. After forty seconds, there's a two-second skip, and then the melody plays again in reverse. We need to spend a lot more time in Dr. Andonuts' laboratory than is necessary to finally realize the secret of this piece of music. When all is said and done, we board Dr. Andonuts' spaceship, and fly it to where Ness and Paula are holed up. We break out, use an invention called Zombie Paper to attract all of the zombies in Threed to the circus tent in the middle of town, and then descend that ladder that a gaggle of zombies were previously guarding. This takes us down the lush, green path toward Saturn Valley and Master Belch. When we finish our quest at Mister Saturn's request, we have a cup of coffee, and the screen fades out, trippy new-age music plays, and text tells us that we've now completed about a quarter of the game, and gone some pretty crazy places in the course of it. It then promises plenty more to come. It might be cautioning us to quit if we don't think we'll be able to handle it.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:59
